19 November 2017 12:03 AM

Most of these politically correct fads are just designed to wind us up and provoke us. For example, I now regret having wasted so much time trying to argue rationally about same-sex marriage. All the sexual revolutionaries wanted was an excuse to call me a bigot. They could then ignore everything I said, or tell lies about me, or both.

It was a tiny issue. In 2014, for example, in England and Wales, there were 247,372 heterosexual weddings, and 4,850 same-sex marriages. Already there are several hundred same-sex divorces each year.

Once the novelty has worn off, I suspect the numbers of same-sex unions will decrease, just as heterosexual ones are doing. The point – that the old ways are dead and gone – will have been made, and the campaigners will move on to something else.

I once thought the same about the transgender issue. But the idea that people are whatever sex they think they are is a terrifying weapon in the hands of modern Thought Police. Whatever you say, you cannot possibly be right about this.

Express any opinion (apart from total submission), and within minutes you will be besieged by condemnation. It will be cleverly based on the idea that you are somehow being cruel to some troubled person, even though you aren't doing this at all.

But that is just a pretext. In reality, a whole moral and social system is being destroyed, and traditional ideas of male and female are the next target, now that husbands and marriage have been done away with. For once you begin down the road of sexual revolution, there's no end. There will always be someone more militant than you.

Since the French Revolutionaries set up the guillotine, the same thing has been true. Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed.

And once changed, they will fit neatly into the Utopia that is planned for them. Utopia, as we find every so often in Russia, China and Cambodia, can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually arrive.

The opposite view (now very unfashionable) is that we are all made in the image of God and cannot be changed into something else. This sounds odd to most modern ears. But in fact it is the foundation for the absolute respect for human life and liberty which underpins civilisation. Once it's gone, you can make excuses for anything in the name of some invented 'right'. Mass abortion is the obvious example.

And that is why The Mail on Sunday's exclusive story, that a teacher has been disciplined for failing to respect the transgender gospel, is so important. His slip was small, and momentary. One of his pupils, who would once have been called a girl, has decided to be male. He called this person a girl. So he must suffer.

In the vanished world of absolute truth, the student's sex would not be a matter of opinion. People might (and I would favour this) treat the person's view of their sex with sympathy and try to go along with it. Who would want to hurt somebody on a matter of such delicacy?

But in the new revolutionary world, truth is what the revolution says it is. This works in many ways.

A Left-wing newspaper recently claimed I had said something I had not said, and do not think. Shown irrefutable evidence that I had not used the words alleged, it continued to claim that I had used them, because that is what it thought I had said.

This leads down a very dark staircase. Reality must increasingly be forced to fit the beliefs of the new elite. Teachers must be punished for speaking the truth, so schools are no longer places where truth is respected or dissent allowed – which means they are dead to all intents and purposes.

And perhaps most grievous of all, teenagers are placed on a medical conveyor belt which leads to powerful body-changing drugs and possibly to surgical alteration.

It is not just crabbed reactionaries such as me who fret about this. In an eloquent article in The Times, the far-from-conservative commentator Janice Turner recently warned: 'But in a decade, when our adult children turn to ask, 'Why did you let me do this? Why didn't you stop me?' we may wonder if this was progress or child abuse.'

The answer to the question 'Why didn't you stop me?' will be even sadder.

We are failing to stop this because we are afraid of the intolerant revolutionary mob, which would lock up dissenters if it could, but for the moment contents itself with Twitter storms and witch-hunts.

I can't laugh this off. It is not just a wind-up. It is a threat to free thought and, after many months of staying silent about it, I feel I have to say so.

That faint rumble you can hear is the mob assembling for another heresy hunt.

An image that tells you all you need to know about duty

The sight of the Queen and Prince Philip watching the Remembrance ceremony last Sunday was almost unbearably poignant for me and (I suspect) many of my generation.

The Duke of Edinburgh was plainly straining every nerve and sinew to do honour to the fellow warriors he actually knew and fought alongside so long ago, despite the burden of his great age. Nothing on Earth was going to stop him doing that. There are so few left from that time. The Queen, with an almost equal effort of will, was yielding one of her most important duties to her successor, a very hard duty indeed.

They are now both so far ahead of us in years that they already seem to be in another time altogether, almost beyond our reach. It is disquieting and upsetting to see these things, inevitable as they are. I feel a great sense of foreboding.

The Prime Minister rattled her plastic sabre at the Russians

Last Monday the Prime Minister rattled her plastic sabre at the Russians, in a silly speech at the Mansion House. She doesn't even know what she's talking about. She said: 'Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea was the first time since the Second World War that one sovereign nation has forcibly taken territory from another in Europe.' This is wrong. Nato Turkey (now an increasingly nasty despotism) seized Northern Cyprus in 1974 and still sits there, unpunished.

She claimed Russia had 'repeatedly violated the national airspace of several European countries'. I asked No 10 for details. Two days later, whimpering that the information was somehow secret, a spokesman could only admit 'Russia has not violated UK airspace'. So whose airspace had it 'repeatedly' violated? No answer. If it's true, the Russians must know, so why the secrecy? The Russian threat is a fake.

Antidote to The Death Of Stalin

At last there is an antidote to the foolish film The Death Of Stalin, which trivialises this monster and his crimes. It is Angus Macqueen's brilliant, harrowing documentary Gulag, which you can watch on the BBC iPlayer only until December 6.

See it above all for the astonishing film of the man-made hell called Norilsk, and the interview with a woman who explains exactly how Stalin robbed her of the ability to trust her fellow humans. But be warned: there are no jokes.

05 November 2017 2:17 AM

Behold my proposed new autumn look for women in politics. The black, I think, is flattering and it radiates an air of cool unapproachability. No Minister would put his hand on the knee of anyone dressed like this; indeed, he’d have trouble finding her knee, or anything else

Well, isn’t this what you want, all you squawking flapping denouncers of groping men and ‘inappropriate’ jokes?

You have lots in common with Militant Islamists on this subject. They, too, believe that all men must be assumed to be slavering predators.

And these beliefs lie behind the severe dress codes and sexual segregation which modern liberals claim to find so shocking about Islam.

Yet on this, it turns out that you agree with them. Any male action, any form of words you choose to disapprove of can and will be presumed to be guilty because, well, men are like that. The culprit will be ruined for ever.

Are you all off your heads? Do you have no sense of proportion?

The country is in the midst of its biggest constitutional crisis for a century, and wobbling on the precipice of bankruptcy.

The welfare system is about to melt down. And you think the most important thing in your lives is a hunt for long-ago cases of wandering hands, or tellers of coarse jokes? Yes, you do.

You have lost all touch with reality, and future generations will laugh at you. Alas, you are in charge now.

Take this, for example: Michael Fallon was one of the worst Defence Secretaries in history.

The Army is a skeleton, the Navy dead in the water, largely motionless and stripped of its most basic capacities.

The former head of the Navy, Lord West, is reduced to writing to the newspapers to try to point out the dangers, because nobody will listen.

But was Mr Fallon made to quit over that? No. Neither the political class nor their pals in the media class care about such things. He was driven from office because he is alleged not to be safe in mixed company.

In a way, this is very old-fashioned. Personally, I am a Victorian prude, though I try to keep it under control. I am still secretly shocked by coarse words, especially used in front of women or children.

I am dismayed to see on public display, on TV and in the street, and in normal conversation, things and events which would once only have been available to shamefully seedy men in shady back-street shops. I don’t want to watch other people having sex.

I also experienced the 1960s and their aftermath, and saw the dreadful, often tragic things that happen when men and women abandon the old rules of fidelity and constancy, and wrongly imagine that total freedom leads to total happiness.

Since then, I haven’t been able to see why the wonderful new equality between men and women, which is one of the great changes for the better in our age, had to be mixed up with the militant destruction of marriage and the traditional family. I still don’t.

But many of those who claim to seek female equality have another, much fiercer objective. They actually see men as the enemy, the ‘patriarchy’, to be overthrown by all means necessary, and replaced by a feminised society. They also see marriage as a machine for oppressing women. Their objectives moved a lot closer last week.

This is why many of those who said they wanted equality also sneered at restraint and manners. They claim now that they want the restraint and the manners back (though the suspicion lingers that much of the current fuss is aimed mainly at making all men look wicked and grubby).

But where are such restrained manners to come from in our liberated society? They were part of an elaborate code of courtship and respect which was learned by example in the married family, and has now completely vanished. In our post-marriage free-for-all, why should we expect either sex to be restrained? All that’s left is the police or the public pillory of Twitter.

It was that old code which allowed us, unlike the Islamic world, to permit the happy mixing of men and women without black shrouds, veils and ‘no-touching’ rules so strict that they even rule out a male-female handshake.

Now it’s gone, what are we to do instead? I am angered by the public denunciations now taking place, not because I believe or disbelieve them (how can we know?) but because they make trust impossible.

Andrea Leadsom, whose own bid for the Tory leadership was destroyed by what I still think was the unfair twisting of her words, should know better than to engage in such things.

Wise men at Westminster will in future go about with chaperones, record and film all conversations with the opposite sex, require women to sign consent forms before meeting them, and certificates of good conduct afterwards. Nothing else will keep them safe from claims that they momentarily applied ‘a fleeting hand’ to someone’s knee.

Or there is always the other solution, the niqab, the burka and the segregation of the sexes. But sanity, the best remedy of all, is obviously unlikely to return any time in the near future.

There are REAL laws against smoking... maybe that's why kids switch to drugs

In secondary schools, illegal drug abuse is now more common than cigarette-smoking. Could this have something to do with the fact that the police (busy painting their nails) long ago stopped enforcing the law against drug possession?

And could it be connected with the generally defeatist ‘they’ll do it anyway’ attitude of schools and the media towards drugs?

By contrast, the Government tries quite hard to discourage cigarette-smoking, and uses the law to ban it in many public places.

Meanwhile, more bad news for the ‘marijuana makes you nice and peaceful’ lobby. The disgusting, callous killer Ryan Gibbons, who twice ran over ex-Naval officer Mike Samwell with his own car in front of his wife, was revealed in his trial to be a cannabis user.

Eventually the facts may just undermine the billionaire PR campaign being run to portray this nasty drug as safe and good.

On a former council estate in the Thames Valley, I saw this rather desperate little poster stuck to a front door, and wondered what tale of persecution and plain fear, at the hands of callous youths, lay behind it.

Is it too late to stop the encouragement of the American Halloween in this country? For many it is a night of misery.

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03 September 2017 2:09 AM

We are already living in a republic. We just don’t know it yet. Diana Spencer, perhaps the most brilliant politician of our age, destroyed the British monarchy 20 years ago. The current Queen continues to occupy the throne solely because she has been transformed by skilled public relations into the nation’s favourite grandmother. Her survival is personal, not political. She goes through the motions of being the Sovereign, but is well aware that one false step could bring the weeping mobs out again, not weeping but snarling, and who knows how that would end? It began in those ghastly weeks in 1997 when all pretence ended that Britain contained a ‘silent majority’ which would one day assert itself and defy the moral and cultural revolution that was eating away at our country.Millions, to be sure, whispered to each other in private places that they were not part of the strange semi-pagan festival of fake emotion, as the crowds piled up their plastic-wrapped flowers and shed tears over a person they had never met. But they had no rally ing point. They did nothing. They were cowed by a dictatorship of grief, even if the grief was largely self-pity. When the Blair creature appropriated Diana as a saint and martyr of New Labour, nobody contradicted him. For alas, it was true. She really was the People’s Princess, if by ‘the People’ you mean the new resentful Britain of wounded feelings, which utterly rejects all the old dutiful rules of behaviour, and which also has no time for, and no understanding of, hereditary monarchy. In that moment was born the deadly, subversive idea that the true heir to the throne, Prince Charles, should never reign, but that we should ‘skip a generation’ and hand the vacant throne (when the vacancy inevitably comes) to Diana’s son – because he is her son. New and credible versions of this idea have been floated in two fictional dramas, House Of Cards and Charles III. The Prince himself can do nothing about this. No matter how hard he has tried to fill the gap in his sons’ lives left by the death of their mother, no matter how thoughtful he is and no matter how seriously he takes his task, the gossip never ends.What this means is monarchy based on opinion poll, not on lawful right. And that’s the end of monarchy. Let’s speculate further into the future. Charles abdicates to please the crowds. William takes the Crown. But he who rules by permission of the polls also falls on the whim of the polls. And when those polls turn on a once-popular William, as they will, he too will be gone, and Buckingham Palace will be a museum. I wouldn’t give it that long. Does it matter? Yes. First because, by having a non-political monarch we can respect, we are freed to be properly disrespectful towards politicians, while remaining loyal to our country. Without a monarch, loyalty can demand political submission.Also, the British monarch is like the king on a chessboard. He cannot attack. But by occupying his square he prevents others from doing so – politicians who long for the supremacy that monarchs have, who yearn to be escorted by booted cavalry and greeted with trumpets, and who want us to respect them even when they don’t deserve it. Especially when they don’t deserve it. It’s not an accident that most of the longest-lasting free, law-governed countries in the world are constitutional monarchies. Yet we seem keen to throw this advantage away, because we no longer know who we are or how we came to be so free and happy.

Now it's Taylor's turn to try the sleazy trick

Is it in the US constitution that wholesome, suburban female singers have to transform themselves into less wholesome female singers, dancing in rubberwear, sneering a lot and generally embracing the sleazy non-suburban zeitgeist, as soon as their fan base gets old enough? Taylor Swift, in her Look

What You Made Me Do video (pictured), is just the latest. Will it be tattoos next? If they started out like this, it wouldn’t work.

Isn’t there something a bit tricky about such transformations?

The BBC's addicted to drugs hype

The scandalous takeover of the BBC’s flagship Today programme by the drug lobby has just got even worse. You may recall a few weeks ago a drug propagandist giving out the street prices of cocaine (the buying and selling of which are imprisonable offences) quite unchallenged, on this programme. This is just one of many instances where the arguments of drug legalisers are prominently presented without serious challenge, on this and other BBC programmes. If, like me, you oppose this policy, you are hardly ever asked on.On Thursday, under the guise of a debate on the Government’s failed attempt to restrict ‘legal highs’, the Today programme invited two people to give their views. The BBC’s charter says it should be impartial on major controversies. So you might think they would have been balanced – one on one side, one on the other. Not a bit of it.The first, Kirstie Douse was introduced as ‘head of legal services for Release, that’s an organisation that campaigns on drugs and drugs law’. I’ll say. Release has been lobbying ferociously for the weakening of drug laws for 50 years.The second was Mike Trace, described as ‘the former deputy drugs tsar’. This is technically correct. But Mr Trace, just like Ms Douse, is in fact (to put it mildly) a veteran fighter against anti-drug laws. So the BBC’s idea of balance is to invite on two people who completely agree and nobody who dissents. How is this even allowed? Then it made it worse, allowing them to be questioned by a clueless, gullible presenter. John Humphrys has been absurdly attacked this week for an interview about fashion. Who cares? But on this occasion he allowed Ms Douse to get away with the claim that ‘we know that the law enforcement approach in a country doesn’t have any impact on levels of [drug] use’. This isn’t true. Japan, where drug possession is still treated as a crime, has much less drug use than Britain. But legalisers try to slither out of this awkward fact by claiming (without a scrap of evidence) this is due to Japanese ‘culture’. If so, why don’t foreigners in Japan ignore the law and smoke dope in the street, the way people do in London? Do they too have a different ‘culture’?Mr Humphrys doesn’t know this because, like the rest of the BBC, he seldom if ever speaks to anyone who disagrees with the billionaire drug-legalisation lobby. We have to wonder, why is the Corporation so sympathetic to that lobby?

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There is absolutely no evidence that the Texas storm was caused by climate change. But watch and see how many times warmist propagandists try to claim that it was. It is this sort of thing which makes me doubt all their assertions.

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29 May 2017 2:17 PM

Happy Oak Apple Day! I hope you are enjoying the holiday. It was supposed to be celebrated ‘for ever’ on 29th May, in commemoration of the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, and of the escape abroad of Charles II (partly by hiding in an oak tree at Boscobel) , after his defeat by Cromwell at Worcester.

I read in Wikipedia that those who failed to wear a sprig of oak leaves that day risked being pelted with birds’ eggs, thrashed with nettles or pinched on the behind, which suggests to me that it has its origins in something much, much older than the Restoration. I think I can recall some mention of it during my childhood, though I don’t recall ever seeing anyone wearing a sprig of oak-leaves. But we all knew the story of Charles the Second’s escape and his concealment in the oak tree (hence all those pubs called 'The Royal Oak') , which was then part of history, which stretched a good way further back into the past, through many more open doors than there are now, and has now become legend (and will no doubt eventually become myth, or is it the other way round?).

Oak Apple Day was officially abolished in 1859, when the highly political Church services marking the defeat of the Gunpowder Plot and the execution or martyrdom of Charles the First were also got rid of. You can still, in the stalls of the more ancient Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, find lovely hand-worn leather-bound Prayer Books which contain these lost, forgotten services. They always make me think of the (fictional) special anti-Cromwell edition of the Prayer Book which forms the core of M.R.James’s interesting ghost story ‘The Uncommon Prayer Book’.

It is easy to see why the other two ceremonies were abolished. One was needlessly antagonistic towards Roman Catholics, and the other must have made nonconformists, who might still see some good in Cromwell, uneasy in their turn. It had by then been many years since the public view of Roman Catholics had been ferocious. While it lasted, it had been very severe and largely irrational.

Peaceful, loyal Roman Catholics had been wrongly blamed for the terroristic Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Equally peaceful Roman Catholics had been blamed, wholly falsely, for starting the Great Fire of London in 1666 . The great Monument to the Fire in London once bore the words ‘Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched’ in Latin, added to the inscription in 1681 after the alleged ‘Popish Plot’ of that year and eventually removed in 1830 at the time of Catholic Emancipation . Also excised at that time, from another panel of the Monument, were words on the column in English about the ‘burning of this Protestant city, begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction’. The last great outburst of anti-Catholic rage had been during the Gordon Riots of 1780, so graphically described in Chares Dickens’s novel ‘Barnaby Rudge’.

So the Guy Fawkes service was, by 1859, thought to be too anti-Roman Catholic. For instance, it thanked the Almighty for preserving the King and his family, Nobles, Clergy and Commons alike, from a ‘horrible and wicked enterprise’ and declared that they had been ‘by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter, in a most barbarous and savage manner, beyond the examples of former ages’ . Another prayer implored the assistance of the Lord God of Hosts in ‘scatter[ing] our enemies that delight in blood. It urged , in the spelling of the 17th century. that He ‘Infatuate and defeat their counsels, abate their pride, asswage their malice and confound their devices’,

On 30th January, the service of commemoration for ‘The Martyrdom of King Charles the First’, speaks of the King’s life being taken away by wicked hands, describes how the King fell ‘into the hands of violent and bloud-thirsty men, and [was] barbarously …murthered by them’ but it also commends the late King for praying ‘for his murtherers’ and begs that ‘this land may be freed from the vengeance of his bloud’.

By comparison the service for Oak Apple Day, though it refers to the ‘power and malice’ of the King’s enemies, is mainly a rather cheerful ceremony of thanksgiving for ther return of ther king to his kingdom, a moment I still regard as a victory for good sense, generosity and the rule of law. I’m sorry it has been abolished, and I wish we still marked Oak Apple Day.

Like the old calendar of Quarter Days, Michaelmas, Christmas, Lady Day and Midsummer, the fading feast-days of Lammas, Ascension, Whitsun and Trinity, and the parade of Saints whose celebrations are almost all now forgotten, these commemorations from deep in our past are a way of stretching out our hands behind us to touch the fingertips of those who came before, and let the know they are not forgotten. We might benefit by trying to know and understand them better.

But, as we have become city folk, for whom the past is a blank, who don’t know what an oak-apple is and in many cases couldn’t identify an oak-leaf, we finally break the long cycle of the centuries in which the dead, the living and the unborn joined hands under the oak trees of our countryside in a pact to protect and pass on what matters.

Once again I am reminded of Thomas Hardy’s impossibly melancholy poem ‘Old Furniture’, which I find especially poignant because in my childhood there were many dark and much-lived-in rooms in old houses where I touched and saw old things all the time, and did not know that this open window to the past would close so completely in my own lifetime.

‘I know not how it may be with others Who sit amid relics of householdry That date from the days of their mothers' mothers, But well I know how it is with me Continually.

I see the hands of the generations That owned each shiny familiar thing In play on its knobs and indentations, And with its ancient fashioning Still dallying:

Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler, As in a mirror a candle-flame Shows images of itself, each frailer As it recedes, though the eye may frame Its shape the same.

On the clock's dull dial a foggy finger, Moving to set the minutes right With tentative touches that lift and linger In the wont of a moth on a summer night, Creeps to my sight.

On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing - As whilom--just over the strings by the nut, The tip of a bow receding, advancing In airy quivers, as if it would cut The plaintive gut.

And I see a face by that box for tinder, Glowing forth in fits from the dark, And fading again, as the linten cinder Kindles to red at the flinty spark, Or goes out stark.

Well, well. It is best to be up and doing, The world has no use for one to-day Who eyes things thus--no aim pursuing! He should not continue in this stay, But sink away.’

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15 May 2017 2:50 PM

I have now finally managed to watch the BBC TV version of Mike Bartlett’s interesting play, ‘King Charles III’ . I saw it on the stage, with Robert Powell in the title role, at the Chichester Festival Theatre a while ago, and preferred the stage version – in which, as far as I can recall, the fictional Charles is *not* shown as saying ‘At last!’ as he contemplates the death of his mother. Nor is this in the original script, or at least if it is I cannot find it. So why did the TV version include it? I do weary of this ‘Private Eye’ view of Charles, as a man frantically waiting to succeed. I have my criticisms of the Prince of Wales, but I am completely unable to believe that he yearns for the death of his own mother.

In fact, as I explain below, I suspect Charles is increasingly contented with his role as heir. He must know that the end of his mother’s reign, which is of course inevitable, will be a severe crisis for the monarchy and so, if he lives that long, which is of course by no means certain, for him, a heavy burden for him personally when he is by no means young and vigorous . Michael Dobbs’s original fantasy on this subject, which I mention below, is now positively ancient. Many elderly gentlemen who wrote obituaries of the late Queen Mother died long before their words were eventually published. If we can speculate on the lives and deaths of others at all, which these dramas rather compel us to do, then why should we assume that Charles will necessarily outlive Elizabeth II?.

Mr Bartlett’s play, in blank verse, is very clever. But it is not a wholly original idea. Something quite similar was done in Michael (now Lord) Dobbs’s ‘To Play the King’, a book and then a TV drama, back in the 1990s. Once again a crisis was foreseen between Charles, newly King and impelled by a powerful conscience, and an unscrupulous Tory Premier. Once again, Charles lost the struggle and abdicated in favour of his own son.

In the Mike Bartlett version, the issue is a very clever one, namely, press freedom, much more cunningly chosen than the general vague differences in the Dobbs book. In my view, Mr Bartlett actually shies away from the conclusions of his own plot. Surely, if a government was proposing criminal penalties on journalists, as are mentioned in the Bartlett play, Fleet Street would be lined up against this, along with quite a lot of academic, legal and other influential opinion?

If the King refused to give his assent to such a law, he would not be alone. And if he dissolved Parliament rather than be forced to assent, how would the election then go? A King’s Party might be a good deal broader and deeper than the shouty republicans who Mr Bartlett portrays as taking to the streets to call for the King’s removal.

And I really do not believe that Charles or anyone in his position would permit tanks to be parked in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace to defend himself against such mobs.

I think Mr Bartlett has got carried away by the Shakespearean examples he seeks to follow, what with the ghost of Diana giving cryptic and easily misunderstood advice, and treacherous courtiers and princes ( and princesses) at every corner.

In real life, a well-chosen combat of this kind might well end up strengthening the Palace against Downing Street, as wise politicians well know. But it would have to *be* well-chosen.

The real problem for the Monarchy is not this at all. It is that the British people are no longer really grown-up enough to have a monarchy any more, and this will be brought home very coldly when the current monarch leaves us alone in a cold and altered world.

Hardly anyone grasps the simple point made recently by Prince Philip, that the monarchy exists for the benefit of the people, not for its own benefit. His own life, dutiful and taken up almost entirely with serving the interests of others, is a complete demonstration of this .

Yet millions think that the monarchy is a crude thing, a mixture of a Ruritanian playboy house and a Bourbon tyranny, living in gross luxury on the taxes of a groaning populace, while enjoying unfettered power. They absurdly think the monarchy is expensive, when it costs the taxpayer next to nothing, that it is luxury-loving, when the monarch lives frugally in small apartments in vast, decaying mansions, that it is snobbish, when the monarchy’s modern roots lie precisely in the bond between the Crown and the East End of London, forged in the 1940-41 Blitz. And its most fervent supporters have always been among the poorest, who have for centuries seen the Crown as a last court of appeal against the powerful. And they think it possesses secret, sinister power when in fact it is largely ignored.

The Coronation will be the moment at which the difference between the dead and gone Britain which understood and accepted a monarch, and the modern country, largely indifferent to and ignorant of monarchy, is demonstrated.

This ritual (you may read the service on the Internet, and there is a pretty full recording of the actual ceremony commercially available) simply could not take place today.

It is fiercely Protestant, aristocratic, proudly backward-looking, monocultural, conservative, traditional and, in its essence, harsh. At its heart are the sword of state and the Cross of Christ, justice tempered with mercy, and the rule of law. The modern world doesn’t much like any of these things, and if Charles wants to jettison quite a few of them, he won’t be opposed by the government or the church or the media, or the Equalities commissars. The real problem is that Charles, who is fashionably caught up in the real religion of our age, man-made climate change, is himself a pestilential innovator. And the crisis will not be between him and his ministers, but between him and the ghosts of his ancestors.

And his monarchy will be the empty plastic thing which his fictional character denounces in the closing scenes of ‘Charles III’. But then it very nearly is already. It is only the last trailing wisps and rags of majesty, like those ancient transparent battle-flags you find in cathedrals, left over from the imperial age and still clinging to crown and throne, which remind us of what a serious monarchy was once like. They symbolise a country which sees in its own revered monarch (regardless of his or her character) a living symbol of its sovereignty over itself, a free self-governing people with no other overlord, except God. They will soon be in a museum, where almost everyone except me thinks they belong.

Whereas egalitarian utopianism, which *ought* to be in a museum, if not in a hermetically sealed and guarded vault to prevent it from rising again, continues to flourish in the open air.

09 October 2016 1:26 AM

British politics has finally vanished up its own pretensions. The old signposts and measurements have all been removed. We have no idea who stands for what or where we are going. Who would have thought to see a Tory conference applauding a Prime Minister for vowing to raise more tax and weaken employers’ rights? Surely that’s the job of the other lot?

In fact most of Chairman May’s speech could have equally well been written and delivered at a Labour conference. She may have derided Jeremy Corbyn personally but she has noticed quite a lot of his ideas are rather popular, especially with the young, and stolen them. Who can blame her? She faces nothing but uncertainty and danger. The Labour Party is very nearly dead but her own Tories seethe with intrigue, rivalry and suppressed dissent.

The landscape before her is like one of those lakes covered in bright green water weed that looks – at a first glance – like a smooth lawn. In fact it conceals slimy depths. Only a fool would try to walk on it.

Her inexplicable breezy confidence about leaving the EU makes me shudder, and I am a veteran campaigner for national independence. I wouldn’t dream of activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which starts the two-year clock for our exit, because it places all the negotiating power in the hands of our continental rivals. And they, especially Germany, hope to scare all the other EU nations into staying in. The last thing they want to do is to make an exit easy for us.

I’d insist on getting all the talking done before taking this dangerous step. As for her Great Repeal Bill, it is nothing of the sort. Until we actually get out, it just confirms 40 years of EU laws and regulations.

Already her Cabinet is openly divided about keeping access to the Single Market. And if anyone thinks that the Bad Losers’ Party has given up its dream of rerunning the referendum, just wait and see. They will fight this in the courts, in the Commons, in the Lords, in the civil service and in the BBC.

Given all these perils, it is only wise of Mrs May to blow kisses in the general direction of Labour voters, while also trying to persuade refugees from Ukip to come back to mummy. The 2020 Election seems far away, but its result will probably be decided during the next two years.You may not like any of this. I certainly don’t. But it comes, as so many bad things do, from taking short cuts and trying to bodge complicated bits of carpentry with a few swift strokes of the hammer.

Millions of voters thought they could have a policy without a government to implement it. They thought they could leave the nation’s fate to the political class rather than taking a hand in it themselves.

They fell for David Cameron’s promise of a referendum, which he never expected to keep because he intended to continue the Coalition with the Lib Dems until 2020. They thought they could rely on the Tory Party to take them out of the EU, even though it had let them down on so many other things.

So, deep down, they changed nothing. A few toyed with the Dad’s Army party of Ukip, now once again enjoying ripping itself to pieces, its main activity. But they wouldn’t see that the Tories had become a blue-tinged version of New Labour.Now there’s a new collective delusion, that Theresa May is the new Margaret Thatcher. Actually she’s the new Harriet Harman. I’ve charted her embrace of political correctness here over many years.

Even her increasingly vague promise to maybe, just possibly, open one or two new grammar schools, provided the middle class cannot get into them, will probably trickle away into the damp sands of compromise where truly good ideas end up in our system.

*****

I know I’m not going to like Netflix’s The Crown, the new drama about the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. In fact I think it should not have been made, and should not be made for another 20 or 30 years when the actual facts are known and the papers available.Even then, it would probably be nearly as bad. Like all such productions, it exploits the real people it pretends to portray. If it were about fictional royal figures, and did not claim to be their real lives, nobody would watch it.

But it cannot possibly be true. Above all, like the misleading, over-rated film The King’s Speech, it tries to see people through the distorting lens of present-day prejudice. My parents and their friends were more or less of the same generation as the Queen and Prince Philip, and my father was a naval officer. And it seems to me that even the faces of Claire Foy, who plays the Queen, and Matt Smith, who plays the Duke of Edinburgh, are wrong. They lack the depth and grief and sense of duty carved into the faces of that generation by their stern upbringing, and by the war. They are too knowing about trivial things, and too innocent of important ones.

Their attempts at the accents of the time sound as if they have been laboriously taught them and they long to burst out laughing, not as if they think it normal to speak like that, as such people really did.

And the odd thing is that they spoke like that while enduring danger, pain and fear and, in a way, saving the world. There wasn’t anything funny about itI am told King George VI, that improbably decent monarch, is shown using the c-word. I doubt he did. Naval man though he was, and so familiar with the whole range of filthy language, I think he would have regarded it as impossibly crude.

And if they can get that wrong, it is like a clock striking 13. All that went before, and all that comes afterwards, is in doubt as well.

*****

I am not sure that the alleged comedian David Baddiel was trying to be nice when he urged the BBC to give me a ‘Right-Wing Hour’ on Radio 4.The last time we met, on a TV review programme, I said that I was pleased and relieved when his dreary film, The Infidel, came to an end. He may not have forgotten.

But even so he now joins many other BBC types, from Andrew Marr to Mark Thompson, in admitting ‘there is generally a centre-Left, liberal bias to its output’.And this is getting worse. As this newspaper revealed last Sunday, diversity commissars are culling BBC performers on the grounds of race and sex. This is a mad outcome.

When I was a Leftist in the 1960s, we at least believed that discrimination of all kinds was wrong. To this day I write ‘human’ when asked for my ethnic details by some busybody.

Even an hour a week in which such wicked ideas could be attacked and mocked would be better than nothing.

*****

One of the saddest sights in the university town where I live is ‘Freshers’ Week’, which means nightly pathetic processions of bewildered teens, clad in uniform joke T-shirts, being led off to bars to be taught how to get drunk. I really hope that the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference was right when it said today’s sixth formers are sick of the Olympic boozing that has become so universal.

It is the drinking, of course, that also leads to so many of the rapes and alleged rapes that cause so much misery of so many kinds. I wonder why we treat this sad business as a joke.

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15 May 2016 1:40 AM

As I have actually been to North Korea, and lived in Russia, I feel qualified to comment on some stupid remarks by a Leftist BBC favourite, Peter Kosminsky.

Mr Kosminsky, a much-garlanded film-maker, absurdly compared government plans to reform the BBC with the control of the airwaves in North Korea and Russia.

Here’s the thing I noticed about North Korea, and which was true of all the communist states in their pomp (which I saw). Those ridiculous slogans you see everywhere, urging praise for the Great Leader, or acclaiming the Party’s wise rule, have a hard purpose.

What they say to the people is: ‘You are powerless. We can put this insulting, arrogant rubbish on the wall in 8ft letters, and you can do absolutely nothing about it.’

It is a deliberate humiliation of all thinking people.

And the only thing comparable to this in modern Britain is the BBC. Here, it ceaselessly transmits material which many of us believe to be false, propagandist or contentious. Mr Kosminsky said the BBC’s main job is to speak truth to power. But the BBC is power. Who can speak truth to it?

We are compelled to pay for it under the threat of imprisonment, it decides which opinions are approved and which are not. It can and does utterly ignore the views of about half the population.

On many occasions I have spotted clear instances of bias, complained in calm, well-marshalled detail about them, taken them through stage after stage and at the end been told – by the BBC themselves – that they have done nothing wrong.

Many of you will have had similar feelings of powerless fury as you have listened to the Corporation’s presenters, and its dramas and soap operas, despising your morals and tastes, ignoring things you know to be true and important, and treating things as uncontested fact which, let us say, have not been proven.

If you doubt this bias, then listen to the words of several prominent BBC people. Mark Thompson, the then director- general, said in 2010 that the BBC had suffered a ‘massive bias to the Left’.

The distinguished presenter Andrew Marr said the Corporation was ‘a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large’.

All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’. The equally distinguished John Humphrys has also said: ‘The BBC has tended over the years to be broadly liberal as opposed to broadly conservative.’

There’s no real dispute about it, and it is quite unjust and wrong. But last week’s White Paper on the BBC offers a tiny spark of hope. The BBC is soon to lose the power to be judge and jury in its own cause. If you pursue your complaint hard enough, it will go to Ofcom, an outside regulator.

I urge you to do as I shall do, and – as soon as it is in place – use this new freedom to the full. My only fear is that Ofcom itself is infected by the same establishment Leftism as the BBC. It will have to prove me wrong. But such small changes can sometimes bring about revolutions.

As much as I mistrust all optimism, I am entitled to hope. Let us all speak truth to BBC power.

A clear message from Moscow

The Prime Minister’s daft claim that a British exit from the EU could lead to war is not just panic-mongering, but wrong.

The real fault-line in Europe lies between Germany and Russia. It’s amazing how many call the EU ‘Europe’ when it excludes Russia, the biggest country in Europe. In fact, the EU is the continuation of Germany by other means, swelling and spreading eastwards, abolishing frontiers and gobbling up territory as it has so many times before.

Russia, meanwhile, has begun to make it plain – by increasingly spectacular celebrations of its 1945 triumph over Hitler, including a Victory Day parade in Red Square last week – that it will not take much more of this.

After decades of putting up with Western expansionism, and the scandalous transformation of Nato from a defensive alliance into an aggressive one, Moscow’s had enough. If there is a new war in Europe, the EU will be the cause of it, and all its members will be dragged into it.

Contrary to what Mr Cameron said, Britain was far safer when it stayed aloof from these continental quarrels. All our present misfortunes began when we foolishly took sides in the great Russo-German war of 1914.

****

Should senior police officers grizzle to the Queen about how a state visit was ‘quite a testing time for me’? Is Her Majesty much interested? She is the Head of State, not some counsellor or grievance expert.

Do members of the Armed Forces likewise inform her that combat was ‘quite a testing time for me’? I do hope not.

I was more shocked by ‘Gold Commander’ Lucy D’Orsi’s apparent belief that the Chinese state visit was all about her, than by the Monarch’s obvious distaste for the way the Government had made her suck up to the appalling waxworks of the Chinese Politburo.

However ‘testing’ Ms D’Orsi found her dealings with the despotic Chinese goon squad, her Metropolitan Police colleagues seem to have found a way of working happily and willingly with them. Some of us will not forget the shocking way they arrested peaceful protesters and searched their homes, while allowing fake pro-Peking crowds to drown out dissent and block it from view. If this was a test, they failed it.

*****

By the way, I am not a ‘Brit’ – a dismissive term used by Irish- Americans, and am surprised to see David Cameron using the word in a serious speech.

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09 December 2015 5:29 PM

This might be a good moment for something a little gentler. Though, as dogged readers will find, especially those who get to the very end, even the gentlest, loveliest places can have their grim or distressing or just puzzling facets.

There is a great balm in cathedral churches. In the blasting heat and painful bright light of summer, their cool, shaded peace offers one kind of solace. In winter twilight, the warmth of candles among old stone arches offers another kind of solace. And in many (though alas not all) the whisper of prayer or the richness of music intensifies the experience.

As France collapsed around them in May 1940, Arthur Koestler and his English girlfriend found themselves in an agreeable part of that beautiful country, not fully realising how bad things had become. They would end with Koestler adopting the morals and low cunning of a caveman, fortified by a great deal of brandy, and so narrowly saving himself from a horrible death at the hands of the Nazis. It is a story everyone should read.

At one point in his thrilling book ‘Scum of the Earth’, he records chiding this unnamed woman (whoever she was, I can imagine her very clearly, well-off, left-wing , bluestocking, languid, with a spine of pure steel) for ‘going cathedraling’, at such a time, the only occasion when I’ve ever seen ‘Cathedral’ used as a verb.

but also Troyes, Langres, Rheims, Autun, Rouen, Le Puy, Perigueux, Strasbourg and of course Notre Dame de Paris. Which leaves me plenty more to do.

But by a strange omission, I had never made the short, odd journey to the scruffy north of the French capital, to see the Basilica of St Denis. I strongly recommend a good map, and taking the RER surface railway, through some of the less loveable parts of the City of Light, rather than the jerky troglodyte journey on the Metro. It means a short walk and a slightly higher fare, but this promenade will take you through a large chunk of modern Islamic Paris, westwards along the Rue de la Republique, right past the Rue du Corbillon, scene of the violent siege after the 13th November atrocities.

It’s a strange mixture of the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe, perhaps the last bit because this was until about 40 years ago a solid Communist working class district. It is something else now, just as its English equivalent would be something else. Every butcher and burger bar is halal, and most women are veiled one way or the other. Young men of working age are roaming around in the middle of the day. It is not as bad as the horrible concrete black zones a bit further out, where hopelessness and segregation are pervasive. But it is plainly nether prosperous nor integrated.

I didn’t find it in the least bit frightening, and thought the police were rather silly to patrol (as I saw them doing) in quartets.

Smack in the middle of this sits the basilica, on a square which is straight out of late 18th or early 19th century France, including a very splendid town hall and some elegant townhouses. Next to the great lopsided church (mutilated by bungling restorers in the 19th century) are pleasant gardens. In atmosphere and setting it’s a bit like St John the Unfinished, the great incomplete Episcopalian Cathedral in an unfavoured bit of New York City, which I described here a while back.

But inside it is uniquely, astonishingly different. Here are the tombs and bones of the Kings and Queens of France, a charnel house of monarchy itself. Originally they were here as a shrine to the French royal family and throne. After the revolution, whose violence and fury against the past are still an embarrassment to France, even now not really forgiven or forgotten by many, it was systematically desecrated.

Many of the tombs were saved on the grounds of artistic merit (which is considerable) , but the mortal remains were spitefully tossed into a common pit like so much garbage, in a frenzy of rage against Christian piety, familial respect, reverence for the dead, continuity, human kindness in general and monarchical authority.

I often wonder about English people who get overly sentimental about France because they think it’s a left-wing paradise. Much as I love France, and Paris, I am always conscious of the horror of the September massacres, the succeeding waves of political murder throughout the country culminating in the mass-drownings of Nantes. The Place de la Concorde is all very grand and majestic now, but I never pass it without imagining the guillotine towering in its midst, the horrible ghoulish tricoteuses (knitting women) sitting cackling at its foot, the scenes of last parting and misery (Charles Dickens’s ‘Tale of Two Cities is useful for reminding us of this as it was). I think of the dreadful people’s courts, the murder of the rule of law, in the name of the people, as always, the deliberate despoiling and de-Christianisation of a thousand parish churches, and in the end the monster turning on itself and eating (as all revolutions do) its own children.

Unlike us lucky British in 1660, they had gone too far ever to put the country

back together again. Each attempt to do so has come apart, though there is still no more monarchical nation on earth. Is there any political figure in Europe grander or more absolute than a French president? Yet in the end he’s a man in a suit, not the inheritor of a great and storied line of Kings and warriors. The chasm left by de-Christianisation certainly hasn’t been filled by Jean-Paul Sartre, let alone Michel Foucault. And France’s continuing divisions, bitterer than ours, never heal, however soothing the ointment and how soft the bandages. Yet a lot of foolish people throughout the world still think and speak as if this series of increasingly cruel and feverish horrors was in some way more good than bad, much as the horrible Chinese state still insists that the monstrous mass –murderer Mao (still on Peking’s banknotes) was more good than bad.

The forlorn sight of these desecrated and part-restored royal tombs of St Denis (including the pitiable relics of poor little Louis XVII, whose story must be one of the saddest of its kind), in their largely-forgotten shrine in a zone of Paris that speaks volumes about the failures of the much boasted Republic, is a great stimulus to thought. It comes rather near to lifting the thick veil that usually divides us from the grisly aspect of death we prefer not to see. You may see actual coffins, 200 years old, dry and cracking, lying in dark chambers. They say to me, ‘here lies the crumbling corpse of the other France’. I recommend it to any visitor to Paris. You will return to the gilded tourist zones sadder, wiser and less given to sentimental enthusiasm for tricolours and the Marseillaise.

Then last week , by contrast, I went back to Chichester, a favourite corner of England in which many of my earliest and sweetest memories are rooted. Oddly enough, as – it being so old and carefully preserved that it does not change all that much - I find myself closer to the past in this portion of Sussex than almost anywhere else on earth.

Somehow the sea is never far away. The cathedral spire, which famously fell in 1861 (and whose fall may have been the model for J.Meade Faulkners’s unforgettable description of the fall of such a spire and tower in his great book ‘The Nebuly Coat’) quietly dominates the old Roman walled city, its modestly prosperous houses and inns in which Jane Austen would have felt entirely at home.

I walked up through unfamiliar 1960s and 1970s suburbs, and traffic far brisker than we had to put up with in 1959, to search for the house whose lower half my father rented, in a secluded lane where smugglers once hid their casks of brandy . The house was gone, and the road plagued with rat-run traffic, the old railway line to Midhurst (along which I can recall the occasional steam train still panting on the hot, somnolent afternoons of that unusually blue summer) torn up and replaced by a cycle track, which is something. Suddenly memories came back of the old tank trap, 5 foot concrete cubes in a ditch, placed there in 1940 and now a historic monument. There’s a notice giving the blocks’ measurements in totalitarian metres, which no British person would have used in 1940 - only the Germans, who never came. I am ceaselessly struck by the paradox of our adoption, even at war and in memorials of war, of measurements which would have been among the first things to have been imposed, to let us know we were a subject people (as we now are), if there ever had been an invasion. ‘Litre and half litre. That’s all we serve!’

I am reminded of Chesterton’s lines ‘I knew no harm of Bonaparte, and plenty of the squire, and for the fight the Frenchies I did not much desire. But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed to straighten out the rolling road an English drunkard made’.

Then I strolled back by another way past a disused barracks where a worn plaque records the day in September 1959 when they celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Quebec. I remember it. I was there. They re-enacted the battle with redcoats versus bluecoats, muskets and a lot of smoke. I loved every noisy minute. Then it was now, immediate, fresh, bright and stinking powerfully of gunpowder. And now it’s an old brown plaque that nobody reads, and a long, long time ago - and how many others who were there recall it? I feel chilly and grown old.

Finally, I made my way back into the city, past the Festival Theatre, new in my childhood, now an established, almost venerable thing, past the sweetly chaotically ornate old Butter Cross, like something out of a dream of Merrie England, and past what used to be an elegant middle-class hotel, all obsequiousness, thick carpets and polished brass (and now isn’t), past what used to be (and now isn’t) the long-established department store where my mother would take us for eclairs after a day’s shopping .

And finally to the strange old detached bell tower and golden-stoned west front of the Cathedral itself, with a glimpse into the gardens of the choir school where I was for a while a non-singing pupil, and where my day was measured by the solemn chimes of the Cathedral clock, and by what must have been our daily processions across to the Cathedral for Evensong, as the shadows gradually gathered in the high vaults and arches, and among the tombs (this, by the way is the site of the famous Arundel Tomb about which Philip Larkin wrote his lovely poem – ‘what will survive of us is love’. The effigies of the long dead nobleman and his lady do indeed hold hands, and have done, in stone, for centuries. It is not a later invention).

Here, I had a particular purpose, apart from attending Evensong again in this place after a break of nearly 60 years.

I had with me a small posy of flowers, and a note. The note read:

These flowers are placed here in memory of the many courageous and selfless Christian actions of the late Bishop of Chichester, George Kennedy Allen Bell, in the hope that these deeds are not forgotten or obscured, nor erased from the memory of those who come after.

And also in memory of the Presumption of Innocence, much missed and fondly remembered.’

I placed them next to the modest memorial to Bishop George Bell which is carved in the wall close to the south transept and to the Arundel Screen rebuilt in Bishop Bell’s memory in 1961 (currently there is a large notice next to this monument about ‘safeguarding’). Ten minutes later my flowers and the note were gone.

I have asked the Cathedral why, and also what they did with the flowers.

Their current response is as follows:

“Our concern is that the public display of flowers together with a note about the Rt Revd George Bell’s achievements - coming directly after the Bishop of Chichester issued a formal apology following the settling of a legal civil claim regarding sexual abuse - was provocative and had the potential to offend those who are sensitive to the issues raised by child abuse. Sensitivity in this area is a priority for Chichester Cathedral, especially given its difficult recent history in the area of safeguarding. Consequently they were removed.”

I have yet to discover, despite active enquiries, which words in particular had been judged to be provocative, of what or of whom, or in what way they had the potential to offend. Also nobody will tell me what they did with the flowers.

06 December 2015 12:51 AM

The BBC’s bias in favour of the legalisation of cannabis is great, growing and ought to be diminished. The Corporation is supposed to be impartial on major issues of public controversy, but on this subject it is rampantly partisan.Your guess is as good as mine as to why this organisation, dominated as it is by London Left-wing metrosexuals, should be so one-sided on this issue.I have tried to pursue formal complaints about the problem but have been rebuffed by the absurd system in which the BBC is judge and jury in its own cause, and has never done anything wrong. Though I have written a book on the subject, I have never been invited by the BBC to discuss it. Yet, last week, the Corporation aired an astonishing programme in which the novelist Sarah Dunant was permitted to transmit ten minutes of uninterrupted pro-marijuana propaganda.She did this on a programme called A Point Of View, which lives up to its name, though the point of view expressed is almost invariably a Left-liberal one. I once applied to be one of its presenters, and was granted a hilarious interview in which the BBC person was not actually wearing an ebola-resistant suit, but might as well have been, so chilly and awkward was the exchange.It turned out (not to my surprise) that my point of view wasn’t the sort they wanted, thanks very much. The excuses were laughable. The real reason was obvious. Wrong opinions. But they are happy with Ms Dunant who, cheerfully describing herself as an ‘old stoner’, confessed to having broken the law of England for 40 years (amazing as it may seem, possession of cannabis is still technically illegal), having been ‘using’ cannabis throughout her adult life. This blithe, on-air revelation (broadcast twice on transmitters paid for by the legally enforced licence fee) followed an admiring description of the legalisation of this drug in various parts of the US as ‘a whole new flowering of the American dream’. It was preceded by the usual ignorant rubbish, which dribbles ceaselessly from the lips of the fashionable, about a non-existent ‘war on drugs’ which she asserted ‘has not worked’. I am not aware that she has ever been prosecuted for her 40 years of admitted law breaking, nor do I think she will be on this occasion, despite her public confession. Does it occur to Ms Dunant, who I suspect of being a ‘public intellectual’, or to those who hire her and accept her work, to wonder how there can be a ‘war on drugs’ or ‘prohibition’ if she can confess on air that she has been breaking the criminal law for four decades, yet remains a respectable person, at liberty and much more welcome in the studios of the BBC than I am?

****

A DRAMATIC GLIMPSE OF HOW BRITAIN WILL RIP ITSELF TO SHREDS

I have finally managed to see the clever drama King Charles III, now playing – with Robert Powell excellent in the title role – at Chichester’s Festival Theatre.It really ought to be adapted for TV or the cinema. The author, Mike Bartlett, obviously loves Shakespeare and has learned a lot from him, especially from Macbeth, with its ghosts and a woman more ambitious, ruthless and cruel than any man (I won’t tell you who gets this role). And it left me more worried than I already was. The plot involves a very possible clash between a future King Charles and the elected government over an issue – in this case press freedom – where the King speaks for the ancient liberties of England. The battle, featuring a slippery and double-faced Tory leader as comic relief, rips the country wide open very quickly. I think this is dead right. A very thin wrapping of civility and tolerance is stretched tighter and tighter across a country seething with division and mutual mistrust.It will only take one major rip in the fabric for the whole thing to come flying apart.

****

Many people have missed the point of David Cameron’s attempt to bracket opponents of his latest war with ‘terrorist sympathisers’. It is this. Our Prime Minister (earlier than many) is beginning to suffer from Downing Street Disorder. It starts with being unable to believe that anyone can possibly disagree with you, unless they are mad or wicked. It ends with being so cut off from the world that you are unable to make a phone call or use public transport. The only cure is to be turned out of office, but many victims never fully recover.

****

A strange silence has followed an extraordinary allegation from former Lib Dem leader Lord (Paddy) Ashdown. Lord Ashdown is, in general, a keen supporter of liberal intervention, and is careful about what he says, being a former soldier and a Privy Counsellor.But a few days ago he said on BBC radio, while noting the feeble contribution of Gulf countries to the fight against Islamic State and to taking refugees: ‘The failure to put pressure on the Gulf States – and especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar – first of all to stop funding the Salafists and Wahhabists; secondly to play a larger part in this campaign, and other actions where the Government has refused to have a proper inquiry into the funding of jihadism in Britain, leads me to worry about the closeness between the Conservative Party and rich Arab Gulf individuals.’I think this is an astonishing thing for a major politician to have said.

****

WAS HILARY'S SPEECH THAT GREAT? ALL I HEARD WAS EMOTIVE PIFFLEThe most miserable and dispiriting part of Wednesday’s war debate in Parliament was the number of MPs who were not embarrassed to read their pathetic ‘speeches’ from scripts which seemed to have been written by the Government whips.Shouldn’t it be a minimum qualification for membership that you should be able to make a brief, coherent speech from the heart? The trouble with these nonentities is that they don’t know or believe in anything, and have arrived in the Commons via a conveyor belt of ambition and flattery, quite unfitted to debate the future of a canning factory let alone the country or the world. I wonder how many of them chose to ignore the views of their constituents, accept the orders of Downing Street, and then pretended that they were speaking their own minds? And if Hilary Benn’s politically illiterate, factually challenged and emotive diatribe was a great speech, then we have indeed fallen on hard times. I am not surprised that the Speaker, John Bercow, did not need to urinate throughout the long hours of drivel through which he had to sit. I expect the whole thing put him into a politically induced coma, and all his natural functions shut down.

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01 November 2015 7:34 AM

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

It is grimly funny to listen to leaders and supporters of a supposedly ‘Conservative’ party using the word ‘unelected’ as a form of abuse. I know the Chancellor is peeved that he failed in his dismally planned and badly executed attempt to make a lot of poorly paid people worse off. But I think that he and his media toadies speak from the heart when they rage against the House of Lords.

I suspect that David Cameron and George Osborne are thoughtless and fashionable republicans, who can think of no good reason to keep the Queen – though at the moment they dare not admit this. It’s not that they actively want to set up a guillotine in Trafalgar Square. It’s just that they wouldn’t waste any tears if the Crown were abolished. Knowing little and caring little about the past, they see no merit in it.

Real conservatives are in favour of all kinds of unelected power and authority.

As well as the Monarchy, there’s the Church, the judges, not to mention the chiefs of the Armed Forces, parents, privately owned media companies, the BBC, school heads – and the thousands of strivers who have won the freedom to hire and fire through hard work and business success.

Democracy plays little part in these things, and a good thing too. To say that you are an elected politician in modern Britain isn’t much of a boast.

It means mainly that you have been picked by a narrow selection committee of politically active careerists and fixers to stand in a safe seat. Backstairs-crawlers, flatterers and obedient conformists naturally do well in this process.

These days it also means that you have been approved by some secretive group of whisperers clustered round the party leadership, who can also remove you if you show any signs of independence.

And we see the results in the Commons every Wednesday, when the backbenchers of both main parties show all the wit and independence of football hooligans, braying mindless applause for their own leaders, and equally mindless abuse for the other side. And then they humiliate themselves by asking tame, planted questions handed to them by the whips.

These whips have power over them because they, not the voters, are their real employers. They can give them well-paid jobs if they are obedient and get them deselected if they cause too much trouble.

That is why the House of Commons was so useless over the tax-credit row, and why the Lords, for all their faults, spoke for the people. Any proper conservative would have known that all along.

No blood, no gore... but truly terrifying

So often I want to watch a film or a TV series, and hesitate to do so because of the violence. I expect I will eventually go to see the new Bond movie, though I shall hide behind something during the eyeball-squeezing bit. And I’m not sure I can face the new Jekyll And Hyde.

Above: Deborah Kerr in the 1961 film 'The Innocents'

I suspect there are millions like me, who’d watch more willingly if we were spared grisly scenes. I enjoy being frightened by films, but not by explicit gore.

The most terrifying thing I ever saw in a cinema, thanks to the carefully built-up drama, was in the ancient black-and-white film The Innocents, based on Henry James’s The Turn Of The Screw. My skin actually crawled with horror. But it was just a woman in black, her pale face filled with despair and grief, glimpsed across a lake in broad daylight.

Fighting to get into my own country

As our population climbs towards 70 million thanks to unrestricted immigration, it gets steadily harder and nastier to get back into my own country. I sometimes think the ‘Border Force’ work on the principle that if normal British people want strict frontier controls, then they can jolly well have them, hot and strong, and serve them right.

While alleged Syrians (whose passports have somehow vanished) leap unhindered from the backs of lorries all over the Home Counties, and vanish promptly into the low-wage workforce, actual documented British citizens must queue for ages to pass through poorly manned passport control.

There, we have no more right to enter the country than a Lithuanian retired secret policeman. And we are treated with unjustified suspicion. On Thursday a ‘Border Force’ person wearing pseudo-military shoulder insignia glowered at my wholly valid passport before asking me where I had come from, which is my business, not theirs.

Above, migrants moving north in Denmark

I have a Chinese friend who bravely resists his own country’s arrogant authorities by challenging such officiousness. And in tribute to him, I replied politely that I was not obliged to answer such questions.

My decision to behave like a free Englishman rather than a potential suspect caused a startling amount of shock, tooth-sucking and frowning, and led to the appearance of a supervisor who told me I should learn the law (as it happens, I have done, and the question was not justified). I said he could detain me if he liked, but he didn’t.

I wonder how many illegal migrants fanned out across the country while I and others were subjected to the stone-faced, suspicious inefficiency of the Border Force? Should I take my holidays by lorry in future, if I want to be treated with respect and courtesy by officials whose salaries are paid by my taxes and yours?

At last, the clocks of Britain are telling the truth again. Noon is at noon, dusk falls at the proper time and I can see my garden in daylight before I leave for work. Enjoy it while it lasts. The Eurofanatics still want us on Berlin Time all year round.

The Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Suzette Davenport, says she wouldn’t ride a bicycle in London because the roads are too dangerous

Police put us on the road to ruin

The Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Suzette Davenport, says she wouldn’t ride a bicycle in London because the roads are too dangerous.

Ms Davenport is the National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman on roads. I ride a bike in London (and in many other places, too) so I feel justified in assuring her the danger to cyclists is real, and largely the fault of the police.

My readers will know that the police long ago abandoned foot patrols (despite repeatedly claiming that this non-existent ‘beat’ is threatened by cuts). But my observations as a cyclist all over the country suggest to me that they have also stopped patrolling the roads by car. Since cameras became common, police patrols have become a rarity. The result is plain to see – much more risky driving, many more lights jumped, zebra crossings ignored, blatant speeding on suburban roads, far more generally rude and inconsiderate behaviour, and a return of the drink-driving that had been greatly reduced by the breathalyser.

It’s all made even worse by the growing number of drivers who have taken illegal drugs, whose possession Ms Davenport and her colleagues do so little to discourage.

If she and her fellow officers did their job, it would be safe for her – and millions of others – to ride a bike. And this healthy, clean and quiet form of transport would become normal, as it is in Holland, rather than the choice of eccentrics like me, or of self-righteous, lawless fanatics in Lycra.